Unmanned vehicles are increasingly also “autonomous”, meaning that the unmanned vehicle has an on-board control system that allows it to perform its mission independently of a human operator. Individual vehicle autonomy is advancing rapidly with regard to capabilities in perception, localization, and navigation.
As unmanned vehicles have improved in their capabilities, so have the variety and complexity of the tasks for which they may be used. However, there are many situations in which a single vehicle cannot meet all the requirements to accomplish a goal.
One approach to accomplishing more complex goals is to use teams of vehicles, among which tasks required to accomplish the goal are distributed. For example, the vehicles may divide tasks among themselves geographically. Or, some vehicles may have capabilities lacking in others, but all cooperate to perform the task. These autonomous vehicle systems can be enabled with communications capabilities that allow each vehicle to extend its perception horizon to include that of other vehicles.
Cooperation among a number of autonomous vehicles is an active field of research. Conventional systems do not tend to easily integrate additional vehicles of the same or other types, to effectively use vehicles with varying levels of capability to perform a task, or adjust to changing conditions such as the loss of a vehicle.
To overcome these shortcomings, conventional systems are also characterized by the need for a highly trained human operator within the communication range of each vehicle. This limits the area of operation to the communications range of the human operator's station, introduces additional latency due to human reaction time, and creates a single point of failure.